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worsethandetroit:

new-aesthetic:

Data Reenactment: Street View video from a stolen phone (by Brian House)

My close friend and collaborator, Sue, had her iPhone stolen earlier this month. The thief had it for 5 days, after which he ransomed it back to her. In the meantime, he had it with him as he drove around LA, presumably looking for other opportunities to be an asshole.

Our phones, clearly, are really personal devices. When we talk about personal data, the mobile phone is as physical an embodiment of this as anything, a data-sensory appendage if you will. What does it mean, then, when we’ve been separated from the device? It feels like identity theft as much as the loss of valuable electronics.

So when Sue got it back, she felt a bit estranged from it. We wondered about the life her device had had away from her, which led her to use OpenPaths to take a look at where it had been. Sure enough, the thief’s home and haunts were pretty readily identifiable.

DATA REENACTMENT: STREET VIEW VIDEO FROM A STOLEN PHONE

As my last post demonstrates, the info supplied from the tracker app needs to be treated with a pinch of salt.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
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Trying to find yourself is a staple of the self-help literature, along with the striving for authenticity and building up your self-esteem. I probably wrote about authenticity and how you needed to practice it in my book** because way back in 2007, I thought it was a good thing, a necessary thing.

Now I’m convinced that’s all wrong. The self that matters isn’t some tightly defined, self-loving, individuated thing in the world. The self that matters is the mashed-up self, the networked self — the self made up of relationships and experiences and interactions and ideas. It’s way bigger and more powerful than the un-networked you.

These are some ideas I want to explore: combinatorial creativity, connectivist learning, the third person perspective in the creative process, and self-transcendence. What all these have in common is they all overturn the idea that the individuated self is primary…

…So we need to stop thinking so much about our individual selves — we need to transcend ourselves. Interesting that some of the most satisfied people combine a love of the new with persistence and self-transcendence. These seem like exactly the traits you’d need to succeed in a networked world. Neophilia (novelty-seeking, love of the new) draws you to new ideas, new people, and new experiences, giving you more material for the mashup that is you and the mashups you create. Persistence keeps you from being merely a dilettante, flitting from one new thing to another. And self-transcendence stops you from thinking that it’s all about you.

Desultory musing* about mashed-up selves | Anne Z. (via tribeofthestrange)
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We, the Web Kids by Piotr Czerski

tribeofthestrange:

Read the whole thing, not the truncated version at The Atlantic!

This may as well be a manifesto for the Tribe – aside from the assumption that this kind of non-zero-sum network mindset is exclusive to the modern young… The Tribe has always known this – but, to paraphrase Phil Dick, we lacked the term.

“We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.”

We, the Web Kids by Piotr Czerski

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